Will Wael Ghonim Change Malcom Gladwell’s Mind on Social Media?

Malcolm Gladwell’s argument that social media did not significantly aid Egypt’s revolution meets a new detractor: Wael Ghonim.

Right up front, I’ll disclose I’m a Malcolm Gladwell fan. I think he’s brilliant and incisive, and his particular brand of insights carry an impressively unique perspective on the world. For my money Gladwell had a greater impact on modern thinking over the last decade than any writer I can think think of. But I think he’s dead wrong in his thinking about social media.

Also, to be fair, Gladwell is not alone in discounting the importance of social media. However, unlike most people who either find social media alienating and therefore get depressed about its ever-expanding influence in modern life, or those who find it irritating and therefore get annoyed by its ever-increasing ubiquity, Gladwell phrases his opposition in a postulate that makes us all stop and consider whether social media is just a bunch of trumped-up nonsense.

Gladwell calls organizing via social media “weak-tie” activism, and argues that social media increases social participation primarily by lowering the bar for what counts as participation. Galdwell writes: “Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years.” His basic premise is that this kind of activism is not new and not dependent on social media. As he puts it: “People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.”

Ostensibly it’s a hard point to argue with. As Americans, we know well from our history books of the importance of what Gladwell calls “strong-tie” activism—where people are impassioned and deeply incentivized to risk life and limb to spur social change.

But where Gladwell (and the detractors of social media in general) miss the mark is in assuming that strong-tie activism and weak-tie activism are mutually exclusive—that they can’t cohabitate in the social media ecosystem simultaneously.

A Facebook page that connects a few hundred thousand fans around the launch of a new Nike sneaker is weak-tie activism—it’s a vehicle that will galvanize minimal real-world activism, because it channels minimal real-world passion. A Facebook page that connects an even smaller number of people around protesting the Mubarak regime can generate massive real-world activism, topple one of the most powerful dictatorships in the world, and capture the attention of the world.

As Gladwell himself wrote at the end of his last New Yorker article on the topic, People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.”

But the fact that people do have this new faculty for communication that circulates messages through society at a faster velocity than ever seen does create new possibilities for change. Sure, East Germans toppled the Berlin Wall without Facebook, and earlier than everyone thought. But who knows how much earlier they would have pulled down the wall if they’d had it?

This is the opinion of Wael Ghonim, one of the individuals responsible for toppling the Mubarak regime. He started a Facebook page to protest the death of of Khaled Said, a YouTube editor whom government police beat to death in the street. It blossomed into a hotbed for Egyptian youth expressing their frustration, and before long the “6th Of April” movement grew beyond its digital incubation and out into the streets of Cairo.

Sure, the strong-tie activism had grown through decades in the organic day-in, day-out of people’s everyday lives. But the ability to share this frustration with their countrymen accelerated the pace of the Egyptian revolution. Ghonim told CNN, “If you want to liberate a government, give them the Internet.” When asked what’s next, after Tunisia and Egypt, Ghonim replied, “Ask Facebook.”

Gladwell starts his last article by pointing out how in China, Chairman Mao’s famous statement “power springs from the barrel of a gun,” would in today’s world be reduced to the sentiment: “Whoa. Did you see what Mao just tweeted?”

I counter—as I think Ghonim and the social media advocates in Egypt would contend—that in today’s world that message would be retweeted as, “Mao is about to shoot us,” and you can be damn sure that tweet would mobilize the Chinese into some extremely strong-tied activism.

That is, if the Chinese allowed Twitter.